Self Inflicted | Chapter 7

"Frantically she pressed the up arrow to go to the next channel and before it had fully come into view she pressed it again. Searching and searching for anything to change what she felt inside. UGH At the end I was waiting for her to apologize and she never even did! Doesn’t she know that's all I was waiting for?"

A blade of grass whistles when blown on between my father’s two thumbs. A wide flat instance of fescue, the more rigid, the higher the pitch of birdsong results. Just blowing produces a nice effect. And it can be played. With inhales and exhales in a rhythm that woodland beasts can’t but help find funny. That day some turkey wandered over to listen to the melody. My dad and I don’t talk much anymore. Not for any reason, we just don’t. Or maybe because of me, maybe I am too uncurious. He lit up then, when the game birds took an interest in his performance. They came right up to us, and he signaled for me to stand very still. If the grass loses its taughtness, you end up blowing raspberries. The Turkey did not like that. They ran away just as quickly as they came. My dad just smiled at me and returned the grass back to its family, placing it down gently almost exactly where he had ripped it from. We walked for ten more minutes around the trail out near my aunt’s house in Story City.

“So, do you still talk to Isla at all?”
Hearing his dad mention her name was a shock. Tanooj didn’t respond. His dad didn’t push. They went back to not talking the rest of the weekend. Well not not talking, just not conversing. They ate dinner as a family and watched Home Alone 3, the one without Macaulay Culkin, and existed around each other without drama. In fact, those nine words were already more unique words exchanged than have been for many years. When he lived at home after high school, and throughout much of high school, his father used to speak to him only in commands and epithets. “Do this” and “do that you lazy bum.” But ever since Tanooj got a real job paying good money in New York, its like his dad could finally breathe. He was no longer worried and striving with all his might to give his child a good life, and that release of pressure made it so that he could finally look at his son without dread and expectation. They started to talk about things other than money. Not much else, but it was a start.

Sanaaya Bhatia died of anaplastic thyroid cancer, just 6 months after being diagnosed. Tanooj was only 12 years old. At the sudden loss of his wife, Mr. Bhatia became extremely anxious as to if he could raise his children alone. Theirs was an old-world style of family, where all of the household chores and duties fell on the mother who after coming to America also went to work full time. 

From then on, Tanooj and his sister Siya stayed often with their aunt, who was glad to have people to fill up the rooms in her otherwise empty home. It took a few weeks before Mr. Bhatia had the courage to tell his children that their mom had died. At first he just said she was at the hospital and would be back, but every pressing question hurt him, knowing that his lovely children would soon be crushed by his words. He told Tanooj first, simply, “Son, Mom is dead.” The boy had had a suspicion. He started to cry and then ask questions and then hit his dad alongside more tears. He didn’t know what to do about it. His hands balled themselves into fists and then relaxed. He grabbed his hair and then let go and sat silently. His dad did not say anything more. He just waited there watching his son feel the same helplessness that he felt.

Siya came home from soccer practice a few hours later and straight away asked “Is mom home!?”
Tanooj, for a shining moment, felt his mother’s presence. He felt like her shoes must have been at the doorstep and saw something move in the corner of his eye. The question of if mom was home seemed a new hope, and through Siya he found respite in the confusing world of the living. Siya charged through the hall way into the kitchen and looked around. Tanooj too bolted into the kitchen only to find, past the countertop, his father sitting on an ottoman in the living room, in the same place he had been when he revealed to Tanooj that his mother had died. The joyous wellspring dried. The dark blue-grey light, the last of the sun for that day, petered into the living room from the glazed patio doors, causing his father to almost disappear into the desaturation.
Siya, still bright eyed, turned to Tanooj, “Well is she!?”
The boy waited for his father to speak, but he did not.
“She’s died Siya,” Tanooj shakily whispered.

There must be something in our memory of situations that influences how we process them. Tanooj learned from his own father, his shadow reaching out and partially covering the cracked screen of his Ipod touch, the terrible news. Siya instead saw a broken father and a resigned older brother in the pale light of dusk.

Her father had still not said a word to her when he went off to bed. Tanooj, in his place, tried to comfort her, bringing his pillow and blanket to her room. At first she asked him and confronted him with possibilities and what ifs, but eventually, she realized that Tanooj had no satisfactory answers. She quieted down. Tanooj stayed and the both of them sat in silence. The silence helped a little, but eventually Tanooj fell asleep. She felt alone. It was no longer two people in mutual helpless understanding. It was just her, stuck in that quiet place, though it was the same silence that felt so reassuring a few minutes ago.

“How could she do this to me?” was a string of words that entangled the 10 year old Siya. “What will happen to us?” knitted itself between “Dad!” a shriek of pain at his pain and “I’m sorry”. Walking along the lace, you only so often found the thought, “Does she know I loved her? I wish I was a better daughter.” I wish that she said sorry to me before she died. Or I don’t know I guess it doesn’t matter, I know she loved me, but why couldn’t she show it better! UGH I KNOW she was sick and busy but what about me? What do I do now?? She’d sit in front of the TV after waking up at noon, her father not forcing her to go to school, and watch inane family game shows that could only distract her for moments before she again was stuck in the web. Dead? Like dead-dead? Is she in pain? Marty (our gold-fish) died last year. We forgot to change the water I guess. Mom yelled at us. I wonder if she was as sad as Dad when Marty died. Mom? Is that you? She would think with hope at every creak in their old wooden house. What will happen to me now? Dad stopped working too… MOM HOW COULD YOU DO THIS! She would erupt in anger and flail on the couch. After a moment of thrashing, on realizing that the flapping did not change anything, she would sit upright and take the remote. She started flipping through the channels. At first slowly, in search of something more interesting, and then faster. Frantically she pressed the up arrow to go to the next channel and before it had fully come into view she pressed it again. Searching and searching for anything to change what she felt inside. UGH At the end I was waiting for her to apologize and she never even did! Doesn’t she know that’s all I was waiting for? I wasn’t trying to be a bad kid, Mom, please…

The kids were picked up from school by their aunt and then picked up after dinner by their father who would sometimes eat with them. Raashi Aunty put in a lot of effort to cheer them up. She prepared elaborate multi-course meals, bought them presents, and found various interesting ways to draw their wandering minds away from the void. The first Friday they were picked up by their aunt after learning that their mother, her sister in law, was dead, they felt peculiarly somber to have the whole weekend at home. Disembarking from the drive way Tanooj, with his eyes glued to his Ipod, walked into his sister who stood frozen in the doorway. He looked up and pushed forward before seeing what it was that shocked her: a startlingly dark blue bird in a massive cage on wheels. One of Raashi Aunty’s friends from the temple had kept for many years a beautiful, previously injured Hyacinth Macaw parrot, and on her way back from the veterinarian, at Raashi Aunty’s request, brought the large bird out of the trailer attached to her truck, and into Raashi Aunty’s foyer. Neither Tanooj nor Siya had ever seen a bird that big before, outside of the ostrich at the Blank Park Zoo. But that was more beast than bird; This was a real flapping-wing bird-bird that perched on a trapeze half way down the six foot cage. Tanooj ran up to the cage and stuck his nose as far into it as he could. The cell bars pressed against his eyelids as he struggled to get ever closer. Siya stayed by her aunt’s side and grabbed onto her shirt. She tarried not because she was young, she was only a year younger than her brother, but because the bird’s solid black eyes were looking right at her.

A few weeks later Raashi Aunty bought a Wii for the kids to play on so they wouldn’t be bored at her house, and of course to brighten their moods. She handed Siya the box with the always comforting words, “today no-one is doing any homework!” Siya enjoyed playing Wii Tennis and did pretty well against her brother, but she had to swap out once she lost to her aunt. She sat initially interested in the game between Tanooj and Raashi Aunty, but the thoughts of abandonment, anger, and fear quickly grabbed a hold of her as she sat back on the sofa behind the two athletes. 

There were other joys: baking and painting and birthday parties. Tanooj found all of this so exciting, he never knew Raashi Aunty was so eccentric, she was always up to something new! Tanooj himself began to bring up ideas of what they could do next. He saw there was a corn maze being put up in August and at first was going to suggest going there to play, but he thought it wouldn’t be interesting enough for his adventurous aunt. He thought hard about how to make it more appealing to her. Maybe they could play hide and seek in the maze, but he didn’t really want to get lost by himself. Maybe they could race to see who could get through the maze the fastest, but well Raashi Aunty wasn’t super mobile with her hip problems. Maybe they could skip the maze and make one at home with cardboard? “No, think! Raashi Aunty wouldn’t think that was very fun, the maze would be so small …” 

Siya was, for a long, long time, unable to see the color that was being restored in Tanooj’s eyes. Her relationship to her mother was complicated, and cut short it was an unresolved one. She doubted, despite all the encouraging words of her brother or the knowing conversations with her aunt, that her mother really loved her. “How could she love me after I acted so badly”, were the unformulated words lurking at the center of the thought storms she kept avoiding but being caught within. In October, her despondency was even noticed by Mr. Bhattia, who had only recently regained the courage to look at his children. She moved slowly. She lost weight. He hadn’t heard her oddly deep guffawing, he realized, for quite some time. The sound used to force its way in from the windows when the kids and their neighbors played imagination games in the front yard and would scare him and his wife, for it sounded like a stranger had come by.

Siya’s head knocked against the glass of the door as her father careened into the acceleration lane of the slip road. Azure and crimson signs yelled to catch her attention, but they were quickly passed by and replaced by larger, more pressing advertisements, ads that lingered for many hundreds of feet. Cancer hospitals, injury lawyers, and golden yellow arches grasped at her vision before she closed her eyes again, hoping to time travel through the drive back to 2953 Salazar Court.

“How has school been, Siya.”
She was surprised to hear him talk to her, but the question did not warrant her move from the semi-comfortable position she had found between her arm and the door. Her jaw was smushed into the sleeve of her hoodie. Her father waited a moment before trying again.
“Your coach called the other day wondering if you felt ready to come back to the soccer team.”
Ugh, this she should probably answer, “I don’t really want to.”
“She mentioned that all your teammates were missing you.”
She thought about Trinity and Ashanti and the rest of the team, “I’ll see some of them in class anyway.”
“I think they even lost a couple of key matches, like the one against St. Augustin. Maybe they need your help.”
She started to get angry at her father. He wasn’t listening to her. He never listens to her. No one ever listens to her! She kicked the back of his seat and said nothing. Her father was OK with giving the conversation a pause, he wanted to focus on the roundabout that always left him with white knuckles. As they turned in to Salazar Ct, he looked into his mirror and saw her visibly frowning.
“Siya!” he burst out in frustration, “You stopped your homework, and soccer, and—Alexi, remember Alexi? You used to talk about him all the time! You can’t keep going like this. I don’t think its good… You need to.. There's some kind of block in your mind.”

Alexi. Siya’s cheeks flushed. She had forgotten about her brother’s wonderful, handsome, friend–but so be it. He seemed to have forgotten about her too. Or more likely, he never cared about her. Maybe no one ever did! Maybe there was no point to anything and she would forever be alone and yelled at again and again. First for not eating, then for not participating in class, and now even for the very fact that she was not happy? There was no justice! NO JUSTICE! Her friends just wanted her to play so they could win more games no one cared about her not even one single person on the entire freaking planet gave a single s word about her or anything that was going on in her life and how can they even care about soccer right now there are so many bigger scarier issues. soccer? That's so useless right now!

“Stop frowning this instant.” That didn’t work. “I’ll have to get help from Tanooj”, Mr. Bhattia sighed to himself as he watched a miniature Sanaaya storm away. 

***

Maryann Lee opened her front door and saw a familiar face. “Siya! Oh my goodness it has been so many years!”
“Hi Mrs. Sokolov!” Siya smiled at the genuine joy Mrs. Sokolov expressed.
“Come in, Come in.”
“Wow, things look so similar to when I was last here.”“Oh of course, only I have grown so old, hahaha.”
“No, No, you look wonderful Mrs. Sokolov! Same as ever!”
“Its a sin to lie dear,” She laughed heartily.
“Alexi! Come down, you’ll never believe whose here!”
There was no response.
“Well, what brings you by?”
“Actually, well…” she paused. “Are things OK with Alexi?” 
Mrs. Sokolov hesitated, trying to decide what response Alexi would want her to give.“My brother asked me to check in on him,” Siya quickly added.